On paper, Common Core is a great idea that—if fully realized—could change education significantly for the better. In reality, implementation has been shoddy, poorly thought out, and lazy. Turning good ideas into effective action is hard work, and a lot of that work didn’t get done, leading us to where we are today (decreasing public support, lawsuits, and an increasingly negative tone in the press). The overarching error has been that Common Core supporters didn’t spend nearly enough time talking to normal people during the initial years of implementation. This has led to underestimating problems that should have been obvious and—disastrously—allowing opponents to frame the issue with little resistance. Common Core is a far cry from failure. More than 40 states, D.C., four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity have adopted the standards. It’s not going away anytime soon. But the drop in public support and continued vitriol for fairly innocuous public policy (we’re talking about education standards here!) highlights a number of blunders requiring recognition. And some lessons to be learned.

Mistake #1: Ignoring materials and training.

Ultimately, the most important gauge of a policy is how it plays out in the classroom. The quality of classroom materials purporting Common Core alignment, including the notorious math worksheets, has been an embarrassment. I could post linksalldaytoparents highlighting absurd questions from their kids’ homework and tests. While it’s easy for defenders of Common Core to blame teachers or school districts or to point out that bad materials have always existed, that completely misses the point. Much of how English and (especially) math is taught under the standards is new—parents don’t understand the strategies employed, kids certainly don’t, and many teachers don’t. Teachers are navigating a new landscape with no official direction, so they’ve been relying solely on publishers’ claims of alignment. Yet we know that most of what’s being provided is notaligned to Common Core. Teachers are not and never will be Supermen; mere mortals need an opportunity to carry out their jobs. The guidance they require hasn’t been provided with nearly enough consistency.

Lesson #1: Emphasize ease of adoption.

The Common Core website is wonderful, but for whom? What teachers and curriculum coordinators require is a way to easily and readily identify quality instructional materials that are aligned to the standards they must meet. They need textbooks and basal readers that are content-rich and provide the “foundation of knowledge” demanded by the standards. This should have been a top priority from day one. Hoping that quality will trickle down into the classroom because of pressure from high-quality assessments is a typical, conservative approach to management that breaks down in the real world. When implementing (and constructing) policy, it is pivotal that the first consideration be an easy adoption.

Mistake #2: Overemphasizing assessments and accountability.

Without assessments and accountability measures, we have no idea whether the education system is achieving its goals, and less-driven teachers have no performance incentive. But a large number of people including many teachers, loathe standardized tests. It doesn’t matter whether their concerns are valid; what’s important is they are widespread and easily set ablaze. The adoption of new standards and assessments may have happened quietly if Common Core supporters hadn’t needlessly thrown up sparks by strongly harping on accountability up front. It wasn’t until 2014 that a large number of influential supporters started seriously supporting (or considering) the idea of a pause on high-stakes testing, and it wasn’t until teachers were screaming so loudly that everyone took notice of the issue. Outside of the inherent unfairness of instituting a set of accountability measures that a teacher hasn’t been sufficiently trained on or had time to adjust to, it was horrible PR. There is no good reason for teachers (or progressives, more generally) to oppose a set of rigorous, common standards, but support has slipped significantly.

Lesson #2: Public sentiment matters. So does fairness.

This was a self-inflicted wound from an ideological blade. Those interested in improving public education need to do a better job of gauging public sentiment on issues like testing. It’s perplexing, frankly, the way certain organizations and individuals seem to completely ignore the masses when constructing policy or policy recommendations. And in this instance, it only made sense to recommend a pause because it was the right thing to do, given that the assessments were not ready in many cases and in all cases teachers had very little time to adjust to the new expectations. Unions and teachers shouldn’t have had to scream for attention; they should have been granted the concession up front. Even if state or federal constraints didn’t allow for a pause, advocates should have stated their support on the grounds of common sense. Instead, Common Core advocates are now fighting a two-front political war—the only issue in six years that the far left and Tea Party can agree on. Selling a policy to the public, and adjusting it where necessary, isn’t an inconvenience; it’s the job of anyone hoping to shape public policy.

Mistake #3: Making education standards a political issue.

Strongly implying that states should adopt the standards in order to receive a Race to the Top grant (even if “Common Core” wasn’t mentioned explicitly) was a calculated political decision that may have paid off in a different time with a different president. Before President Obama was elected, it would have been difficult to imagine education standards becoming a major battleground in a culture war over federal overreach. But granted those concessions, the behavior of the administration has still been extremely unhelpful. On top of the $350 million budgeted for development of the Common Core assessments, the U.S. Department of Education strongly implied No Child Left Behind waivers would be tied to Common Core adoption (burgeoned by the recent Oklahoma decision), infuriating the Tea Party and others. Today, the largest threat to the future of Common Core is a groundswell of opposition from conservatives, driven by concerns over a federal curriculum and—let’s be honest—a hatred for anything tied to the Obama administration. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s lawsuit, while frivolous on its face, is an attempt to leverage this political inertia for his own ambitions. So naturally the department did the one thing that would bolster his claims and encourage further discontent—they punished a state for dropping Common Core.

Lesson #3: Style points count for nothing; just run out the clock.

The lesson here is simple and well-known to any football fan: A win is a win, and if you’re up by 6 with two minutes left, you don’t throw into heavy coverage. Protect the ball, pick up the first down, and run out the clock. In other words, nearly every state in the country had adopted Common Core; the administration didn’t need to force it (or “college- and career-ready standards”) with NCLB waivers—particularly at a time when the Tea Party was peaking in strength. It was an unnecessary Hail Mary pass thrown directly into the outstretched hands of the opposition defense. Perhaps Arne Duncan and company underestimated the backlash brewing over the standards; perhaps they thought it necessary to decrease the likelihood of the standards’ repeal. Either way, it shouldn’t have happened. Tuck the ball. Take the win. Play another day.

To be fair, there have been slow improvements on all three of the issues laid out. But had there been more public engagement up front and action on these issues early on, Bobby Jindal’s most recent theatrics might have involved his continued support for the standards rather than a populist appeal to destroy them.

Matt Richmond is an education-policy researcher based in the DC area. Reach him via email or Twitter.

While I appreciate Matt's analysis of the CCSS roll out, I believe it fails to concede at once the idea that it's far more complex than to simplify lessons/failures into 3 categories. California & D.C.'s implementation went pretty smoothly. Indiana adopted, scrapped (after public outcry), and ended up renaming the CCSS "Hoosier" standards (in response to the strong—albeit wrongly placed—feeling that it was a federal takeover). The problem isn't the standards, as aptly noted. It was having 50+ states/territories in a country that doesn't allow for a holistic approach to policy—we have 50+ experiments happening every day with policy, eduction notwithstanding. The public outcry in many instances has been a symptom of wider misunderstanding of CCSS, where some folks equate it to "Obamacore". It was messaging that was at issue in NY, as well as botched assessments & implementation. In the end, the CCSS debate has to be continually treated as a far more nuanced situation, and with the idea aforementioned: 50+ experiments. The creators of the CCSS also, in my analysis, failed to create models/procedures for effective implementation. NY created lesson plans that could be used by teachers—a good step. Some states even spent what little $$ they already have on training teachers. In sum, I am concerned that Matt tries to distill the issue into 3 areas, when in fact, it's a far more complex, nuanced situation in 50+ locations.

Jay: Obviously, you're right. I didn't mean to imply that everything could be boiled down to three issues; as a researcher that sort of thing drives me crazy. I was simply trying to point out three of the largest issues that 1) were preventable and 2) we can actually glean lessons from. The difficulty of implementing federal policy in a federalist system is an omnipresent issue and, as you pointed out, is hardly limited to education policy.

Your point about public outcry is correct I think, but what I'm trying to explain in this post is that it goes beyond misinformation and a lack of understanding. Most policies are misunderstood by the general public because most of the public doesn't do this stuff for a living. It's unreasonable to expect a plumber or a nurse to understand the nuances distinguishing curricula from standards, for instance, because they have more important things to do. But the advocates and policy makers didn't spend nearly enough time talking to normal people to identify their concerns before they became explosive, and to nip it in the bud. They didn't spend nearly enough time framing the issue upfront, to direct the public discussion. Instead, they left it to the opposition to set the tone of the debate and frame the topic. One of the most important rules of policy framing is that it's very hard to change one that has already been established. This has been a disaster for CCSS advocates both because they failed to take the initiative to set the conversation and because, as I pointed out, they let both reasonable and unreasonable concerns spiral out of control.

Similarly, and even less excusably, they failed to do these things with teachers. In some states they did a much better job with training and education, but these were supposed to be *common* standards. The national organizations involved--and there are a large number of them, with deep pockets--needed to prioritize getting teachers on board, listening to and looking for solutions to problems and concerns, and distinguishing this reform as different from "reform." Because this wasn't done, many teachers are now the Common Core's biggest critics. And they end up repeating the same misinformation that we hear from parents, Glenn Beck, and the public writ large. Because they're teachers and should hypothetically know better than most, their opinions resonate loudly and provide legitimacy to what might otherwise be written off as conspiracy theory. Even if advocates ignored the general public, at minimum they should have spent a great deal more effort reaching teachers from day one. The first two mistakes that I brought up in this post would have been easily avoided, had their voices been given serious attention.

Common Core's difficulties (and successes) are extremely nuanced and extend about 100 miles beyond what I brought up here. But I believe that had these three mistakes been avoided (by paying more attention to public/teacher engagement) we'd be in a very different place today.

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